Should Mario let the Goombas be?
Recently, I’ve come into contact to a lot of games that force you to choose how lethal you are with your enemies. Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja are a few games that change the story (and gameplay) drastically depending on whether you let your enemies live.
I’m always seeing comics/videos from the perspective of Mario’s enemies, showing how their family is torn up, how they’re left in endless bouncing hell, etc. So, I’m wondering what would happen if the concepts of choosing whether your enemies live was applied to Mario.
What if I new ending was achieved if you never bounced on an enemy except for Bowser? (And maybe even find a non-lethal way to take him down as well?) I’m sure the game would be a lot harder, since now you can’t use enemies as ways to get to hard to reach platforms. And the usefulness of the items would be altered as well; you’d want to use the ice flower way more than the fire flower.
Maybe there are some intermediate benefits of being a pacifist. Maybe once you pass all the koopas, they give you your own turtle shell to keep permanently. Maybe the monty moles will team up to create a tunnel that skips the next world.
I’m curious to see what Mario games are possible to beat without defeating a single enemy. (Minus Bowser, of course.) The earlier 2D games probably would allow you to bypass most of the enemies and go straight for the flag.
Thoughts?
